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Bela and Aliza Eckstein's passport
Untill the age of 18, Aliza Kishon believed that she was the daughter of Bela and Rafael Melamed. Only then did she learn that Rafael was in fact her adoptive father.
Bela Aslanova Eckstein was born in Varna, Bulgaria in 1920. In the early 1940s she went to visit her sister Victoria Kavezon in Sarajevo; there, she married Marko Eckstein. At the end of 1941, Bela and Vicky were taken to the Loborgrad labor camp in North Croatia. Bela was pregnant when she was taken to the camp. She gave birth to her daughter Aliza in a nearby hospital. After the birth, Bela managed to flee with her daughter to the Bulgarian embassy and thanks to her foreign papers, received permission to return to her family in Varna, Bulgaria. Marko died not long after Aliza was born, and in 1944 Bela married Rafael Melamed, who adopted Aliza as his own daughter. In 1948 the Melamed family immigrated to Israel.
Aliza donated the passport that she and her mother had used and that documents their movements, to Yad Vashem, as well as her birth certificate and a photograph of her mother Bela.